Philosophical AnalysisOrigins & Design 18:1

Methodological Naturalism?

Alvin PlantingaDepartment of Philosophy
Decio Hall
University of Notre Dame

Abstract

The philosophical doctrine of methodological naturalism holds
that, for any study of the world to qualify as "scientific,"
it cannot refer to God's creative activity (or any sort of divine
activity). The methods of science, it is claimed, "give us
no purchase" on theological propositions--even if the latter
are true--and theology therefore cannot influence scientific explanation
or theory justification. Thus, science is said to be religiously
neutral, if only because science and religion are, by their very
natures, epistemically distinct. However, the actual practice
and content of science challenge this claim. In many areas, science
is anything but religiously neutral; moreover, the standard arguments
for methodological naturalism suffer from various grave shortcomings.
[This is the first part of a two-part article.]

According to an idea widely popular since the Enlightenment,
science (at least when properly pursued) is a cool, reasoned,
wholly dispassionate1
attempt to figure out the truth about ourselves and the world,
entirely independent of ideology, or moral convictions, or religious
or theological commitments. Of course this picture has lately
developed some cracks. It is worth noting that 16 centuries ago,
St. Augustine provided the materials for seeing that this common
conception can't really be correct. It would be excessively naïve
to think that contemporary science is religiously and theologically
neutral. Perhaps parts of science are like that. The size
and shape of the earth and its distance from the sun, the periodic
table of the elements, the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem--these
are all in a reasonable sense religiously neutral. But many other
areas of science are very different. They are obviously and deeply
involved in a clash between opposed religious world views. There
is no neat recipe for telling which parts of science are neutral
with respect to this contest and which are not; what we have is
a continuum rather than a simple distinction. But here is a rough
rule of thumb: the relevance of a bit of science to this contest
depends upon how closely that bit is involved in the attempt to
come to understand ourselves as human beings. Perhaps there is
another variable: how "theoretical" the bit in question
is, in the sense of being directed at understanding, as opposed
to control.

In this article I begin by pointing to three examples of the
religious non-neutrality of scientific claims or hypotheses. I
shall then argue that a Christian academic and scientific community
ought to pursue science in its own way, starting from and
taking for granted what we know as Christians. (This suggestion
suffers from the considerable disadvantage of being at present
both unpopular and heretical; I shall argue, however, that it
also has the considerable advantage of being correct). Now one
objection to this suggestion is enshrined in the dictum that science
done properly necessarily involves "methodological naturalism,"
or (as Basil Willey calls it) "provisional atheism."2 This is the idea that
science, properly so-called, cannot involve religious belief or
commitment. My main aim in this paper is to explore, understand,
discuss, and evaluate this claim and the arguments for it.

Is Science Religiously Neutral? Three
Examples

Simon and Altruism

First, then, some examples that suggest that science is not
religiously neutral.3
I begin with Herbert Simon's article, "A Mechanism for Social
Selection and Successful Altruism."4 This article is concerned with the problem
of altruism: Why, asks Simon, do people like Mother Teresa do
the things that they do? Why do they devote their time and energy
and indeed their entire lives to the welfare of other people?
Of course it isn't only the great saints of the world that display
this impulse; most of us do so to one degree or another.

How, says Simon, can we account for this kind of behavior?
The rational way to behave, he says, is to act or try to
act in such a way as to increase one's personal fitness; i.e.,
to act so as to increase the probability that one's genes will
be widely disseminated in the next and subsequent generation,
thus doing well in the evolutionary derby.5 A paradigm of rational behavior, so conceived,
was reported in the South Bend Tribune of December 21,
l991 (dateline Alexandria (Va.)). "Cecil B. Jacobson, an
infertility specialist, was accused of using his own sperm to
impregnate his patients; he may have fathered as many as 75 children,
a prosecutor said Friday." Unlike Jacobson, however, such
people as Mother Teresa and Thomas Aquinas cheerfully ignore the
short- or long-term fate of their genes. What is the explanation
of this behavior?

The answer, says Simon, is two mechanisms: "docility"
and "bounded rationality":

Docile persons tend to learn and believe what they perceive
others in the society want them to learn and believe. Thus the
content of what is learned will not be fully screened for its
contribution to personal fitness (p. 1666).

Because of bounded rationality, the docile individual will
often be unable to distinguish socially prescribed behavior that
contributes to fitness from altruistic behavior [i. e., socially
prescribed behavior that does not contribute to fitness--AP].
In fact, docility will reduce the inclination to evaluate independently
the contributions of behavior to fitness. .... By virtue of bounded
rationality, the docile person cannot acquire the personally
advantageous learning that provides the increment, d,
of fitness without acquiring also the altruistic behaviors that
cost the decrement, c. (p. 1667).

The idea is that a Mother Teresa or a Thomas Aquinas displays
bounded rationality; they are unable to distinguish socially prescribed
behavior that contributes to fitness from altruistic behavior
(socially prescribed behavior which does not). As a result, they
fail to acquire the personally advantageous learning that provides
that increment d of fitness without, sadly enough, suffering
that decrement c exacted by altruistic behavior. They acquiesce
unthinkingly in what society tells them is the right way to behave;
and they aren't quite up to making their own independent evaluation
of the likely bearing of such behavior on the fate of their genes.
If they did make such an independent evaluation (and were
rational enough to avoid silly mistakes) they would presumably
see that this sort of behavior does not contribute to personal
fitness, drop it like a hot potato, and get right to work on their
expected number of progeny.

No Christian could accept this account as even a beginning
of a viable explanation of the altruistic behavior of the Mother
Teresas of this world. From a Christian perspective, this doesn't
even miss the mark; it isn't close enough to be a miss. Behaving
as Mother Teresa does is not a display of bounded rationality--as
if, if she thought through the matter with greater clarity and
penetration, she would cease this kind of behavior and instead
turn her attention to her expected number of progeny. Her behavior
displays a Christ-like spirit; she is reflecting in her limited
human way the magnificent splendor of Christ's sacrificial action
in the Atonement. (No doubt she is also laying up treasure in
heaven). Indeed, is there anything a human being can do that is
more rational than what she does? From a Christian perspective,
the idea that her behavior is irrational (and so irrational that
it needs to be explained in terms of such mechanisms as unusual
docility and limited rationality!) is hard to take seriously.
For from that perspective, behavior of the sort engaged in by
Mother Teresa is anything but a manifestation of 'limited rationality'.
On the contrary: her behavior is vastly more rational than that
of someone who, like Cecil Jacobson, devotes his best efforts
to seeing to it that his genes are represented in excelsis
in the next and subsequent generations.

Simon suggests or assumes that the rational course for
a human being to follow is to try to increase her fitness. Rationality,
however, is a deeply normative notion; the rational course
is the right course, the one to be recommended, the one you ought
to pursue. Simon, therefore, seems to be making a normative claim,
or perhaps a normative assumption; it is a vital and intrinsic
part of what he means to put forward. If so, however, can it really
be part of science? Science is supposed to be non-evaluative,
non-normative, non-prescriptive: it is supposed to give us facts,
not values. Can this claim that the rational course is to pursue
fitness then be part of science, of a scientific explanation,
or a scientific enterprise?

But perhaps there is a reply. What, exactly, does Simon mean
here by such terms as 'rational' and 'rationality'? At least two
things; for when he says that the rational course, for a human
being, is to try to increase her fitness, he isn't using the term
in the same way as when he says Mother Teresa and people like
her suffer from bounded rationality. The latter means simply that
people like this aren't quite up to snuff when it comes to intelligence,
perspicacity, and the like; they are at least slightly defective
with respect to acuteness. It is because of the lack of acuity
that they fail to see that the socially prescribed behavior in
question is really in conflict with their own best interests or
the achievement of their own goals. This limited rationality is
a matter of running a quart low, of playing with less than a full
deck, of being such that the elevator doesn't go all the way to
the top floor.

When he says that the rational course for a human being is
to strive to promote fitness, he presumably means something different
by the term 'rational', namely, that a properly functioning human
being, one not subject to malfunction (one that isn't insane,
or retarded, or reacting to undue stress, or in the grip of some
other malfunction or dysfunctional state) will as a matter of
fact have certain goals, try to attain certain conditions, aim
to bring about certain states of affairs. Presumably survival
would be one of these goals; but another one, says Simon, is promoting
or maximizing fitness.

And there are two things to say about this claim. In the first
place, we might ask what the evidence is that, as a matter of
fact, properly functioning human beings do indeed all or nearly
all display this goal. It isn't easy to see precisely how to answer
this question. One suspects that a study done by way of the usual
polling and questionnaire techniques wouldn't yield this result;
most of the properly functioning people I know, anyway, wouldn't
give as one of their main goals that of increasing their fitness.
(Perhaps you will retort that this is because most of the people
I know are past childbearing age, so that directly increasing
their genetic representation in the next generations is no longer
a live option. Of course they could do their best to see that
they have a lot of grandchildren--judiciously distributed bribes,
perhaps, or arranging circumstances so that their daughters will
become pregnant, or encouraging their younger relatives to drop
out of school and have children). But obviously there is always
another option: we can say that the goals or aims in question
aren't conscious, are not available to conscious inspection. They
are rather to be determined by behavior. It is your behavior that
reveals and demonstrates your goals, no matter what you say (and,
indeed, no matter what you think).

Well, perhaps so. It would still remain to be shown or argued
that properly functioning human persons do as a matter of fact
display in their behavior this goal of increasing their fitness--where,
of course, we couldn't sensibly take their displaying this goal
as a criterion of normality or proper function. As a matter of
fact, Simon doesn't proceed in this way; his procedure, with respect
to this question, is a priori rather than a posteriori.
He doesn't tell us what it is that leads him to think that properly
functioning human beings will have this goal, but one suspects
his answer would be that human beings acquire this goal somehow
by virtue of our evolutionary history. I suspect he thinks it
would follow from any proper evolutionary account of human beings
(and for many other species as well) that they have maximizing
fitness as a goal. How exactly this story would go is perhaps
not entirely clear; but for the moment we can ignore the difficulties.

The second thing to say about this claim is that the same question
arises with respect to it: isn't the idea of proper function
itself a normative notion? There is a connected circle of notions
here: proper function, health, normality (in the normative, not
the descriptive sense) dysfunction, damage, design (a properly
functioning lung is working the way lungs are designed to work),
purpose, and the like. Perhaps none of these notions can be analyzed
in terms of notions outside the charmed circle (so that this circle
would resemble that involving the notions of necessity, possibility,
entailment, possible worlds, and so on). And aren't these notions
normative? Indeed, there is a use of 'ought' to go with them.
When the starter button is pressed, the engine ought to turn over--i.e.,
if the relevant parts are functioning properly, the engine will
turn over when the starter button is pressed. When you suffer
a smallish laceration, a scab ought to form over the wound; that
is, if the relevant parts of your body are functioning properly,
a scab will form over the wound. A six-month-old baby ought to
be able to raise its head and kick its feet simultaneously; that
is, a healthy, normal (in the normative, not the statistical sense)
six-month-old baby can do these things. Must we not concede, therefore,
that this notion of proper function is itself a normative notion,
so that if Simon uses 'rationality' in a way explicable only in
terms of proper function, then what he says is indeed normative
and thus not properly a part of science?

Perhaps; but if the employment of the notion of normality or
proper function is sufficient to disqualify a discourse from the
title of science, then a lot more than Simon's account of altruism
will turn out not to be science. Consider functional generalizations--the
sorts of generalizations to be found in biological and psychological
descriptions of the way in which human beings or other organic
creatures work. As John Pollock points out, such generalizations
seem to involve an implicit presupposition:

when we formulate similar generalizations about machines,
the generalizations we formulate are really about how machines
work when they work properly; or when they are not broken. Similarly
it seems that generalizations about organisms should be understood
as being about the way they work when they are 'working normally.'6

Here 'working normally' and 'not being broken' mean something
like 'subject to no dysfunction' or 'working properly' or 'not
malfunctioning'. Functional generalizations about organisms, therefore,
say how they work when they are functioning properly. But of course
biological and social science is full of functional generalizations.
Thus, if Simon is appealing to the notion of proper function in
his idea of rationality, he may be appealing to a kind of normativity;
but that kind of normativity is widely found in science. Or, at
any rate, it is widely found in what is called science. Some will
maintain that the notion of proper function doesn't belong in
science unless it can be explained, somehow, in other terms--finally,
perhaps, in terms of the regularities studied in physics and chemistry.
We need not enter that disputatious territory here; it is sufficient
to note that if Simon is appealing to the notion of proper function,
then what he does appeal to is in fact to be found over the length
and breadth of the social and biological sciences. Therefore,
we should not deny the title 'science' to what Simon does unless
we are prepared to raise the same strictures with respect to most
of the rest of what we think of as social and biological science.
And even if we do say that Simonian science isn't really science,
nothing substantive changes; my point will then be, not that religious
considerations bear on science properly so-called, but rather
that they bear on what is in fact called science, which is a very
important, indeed, dominant part of our intellectual and cultural
life.

I shall therefore assume that Simonian science is science.
So in Simon's account of altruism we have an example of a scientific
theory that is clearly not neutral with respect to Christian commitment;
indeed, it is inconsistent with it. Simon's theory also illustrates
another and quite different way in which religious considerations
are relevant to science; they bear on what we take it needs explanation.
From Simon's perspective, it is altruism that needs explanation;
from a Christian or theistic perspective, on the other hand, it
is only to be expected that humans beings would sometimes act
altruistically. Perhaps what needs explanation is the way in which
human beings savage and destroy each other.

The Grand Evolutionary Myth

Since I have dealt with this example elsewhere (in the essays
referred to in footnote 3) I can be brief here. Consider the Grand
Evolutionary Myth (GEM). According to this story, organic life
somehow arose from non-living matter by way of purely natural
means and by virtue of the workings of the fundamental regularities
of physics and chemistry. Once life began, all the vast profusion
of contemporary flora and fauna arose from those early ancestors
by way of common descent. The enormous contemporary variety of
life arose, basically, through natural selection operating on
such sources of genetic variability as random genetic mutation,
genetic drift and the like. I call this story a myth not because
I do not believe it (although I do not believe it) but because
it plays a certain kind of quasi-religious role in contemporary
culture. It is a shared way of understanding ourselves at the
deep level of religion, a deep interpretation of ourselves to
ourselves, a way of telling us why we are here, where we come
from, and where we are going.

Now it is certainly possible--epistemically possible,7 anyway--that GEM is true; it certainly seems
that God could have done things in this way. Certain parts of
this story, however, are, to say the least, epistemically shaky.
For example, we hardly have so much as decent hints as to how
life could have arisen from inorganic matter just by way of the
regularities known to physics and chemistry.8 (Darwin found this question deeply troubling;9 at present the problem
is enormously more difficult than it was in Darwin's day, now
that some of the stunning complexity of even the simplest forms
of life has been revealed).10
No doubt God could have done things that way if he had chosen
to; but at present it looks as if he didn't choose to.

So suppose we separate off this thesis about the origin of
life. Suppose we use the term 'evolution' to denote the much weaker
claim that all contemporary forms of life are genealogically related.
According to this claim, you and the flowers in your garden share
common ancestors, though we may have to go back quite a ways to
find them. Many contemporary experts and spokespersons--Francisco
Ayala, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Gould, William Provine, and Philip
Spieth, for example--unite in declaring that evolution is no mere
theory, but established fact. According to them, this story is
not just a virtual certainty, but a real certainty.11 Now why do they think so? Given the spotty
character of the evidence--for example, a fossil record displaying
sudden appearance and subsequent stasis and few if any genuine
examples of macroevolution, no satisfactory account of a mechanism
by which the whole process could have happened, and the like12--these claims of certainty
seem at best wildly excessive. The answer can be seen, I think,
when we realize that what you properly think about these claims
of certainty depends in part on how you think about theism. If
you reject theism in favor of naturalism, this evolutionary story
is the only game in town, the only visible answer to the question:
Where did all this enormous variety of flora and fauna come from?
How did it all get here? Even if the fossil record is at best
spotty and at worst disconfirming, this story is the only answer
on offer (from a naturalistic perspective) to these questions.

From a theistic or Christian perspective, however, things are
much less frantic. The theist knows that God created the heavens
and the earth and all that they contain; she knows, therefore,
that in one way or another God has created all the vast diversity
of contemporary plant and animal life. But of course she isn't
thereby committed to any particular way in which God did this.
He could have done it by broadly evolutionary means; but on the
other hand he could have done it in some totally different way.
For example, he could have done it by directly creating certain
kinds of creatures--human beings, or bacteria, or for that matter
sparrows13 and houseflies--as
many Christians over the centuries have thought. Alternatively,
he could have done it the way Augustine suggests: by implanting
seeds, potentialities of various kinds in the world, so that the
various kinds of creatures would later arise, although not by
way of genealogical interrelatedness. Both of these suggestions
are incompatible with the evolutionary story.

A Christian therefore has a certain freedom denied her naturalist
counterpart: she can follow the evidence14 where it leads. If it seems to suggest that
God did something special in creating human beings (in such a
way that they are not genealogically related to the rest of creation)15 or reptiles or whatever,
then there is nothing to prevent her from believing that God did
just that. Perhaps the point here can be put like this: The epistemic
probability of the whole grand evolutionary story is quite different
for the theist and for the naturalist. The probability of this
story with respect to the evidence together with the views a theist
typically holds, is much lower than its probability with respect
to evidence together with the views the naturalist typically holds.
So the way in which the theory of evolution is not religiously
neutral is not, as with Simon's explanation of Mother Teresa,
that it is straightforwardly incompatible with Christian teaching;
it is rather that the view in question is much more probable with
respect to naturalism and the evidence than it is with respect
to theism and that evidence.

There is a connected issue in the same area, but with a different
twist. Prominent writers in the scientific community--for example,
Dawkins, Futuyma, Gould, Provine, Simpson, and others--unite in
declaring that evolutionary biology shows that there is a substantial
element of randomness or chance involved in the origin and development
of the human species; therefore, human beings (so they claim)
have not been designed by God or anyone else. Gould writes that
before Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us.
After Darwin, though, says Gould, we realize that:

No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of
nature (though Newton's clock-winding god might have set up the
machinery at the beginning of time and then let it run). No vital
forces propel evolutionary change. And whatever we think of God,
his existence is not manifest in the products of nature.

Gould's sentiments are stated more clearly by Futuyma:

By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind,
uncaring process of natural selection Darwin made theological
or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.
Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society
and Freud's attribution of human behavior to processes over which
we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial
plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism--of much of
science, in short--that has since been the stage of most Western
thought.16

Clearer yet, perhaps, is George Gaylord Simpson:

Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already
evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life
can be explained by purely naturalistic or, in a proper sense
of the sometimes abused word, materialistic factors. They are
readily explicable on the basis of differential reproduction
in populations (the main factor in the modern conception of natural
selection) and of the mainly random interplay of the known processes
of heredity. ...Man is the result of a purposeless and natural
process that did not have him in mind.17

The same claim is made by Richard Dawkins:

All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature
is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special
way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and
springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose
in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious
automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know
is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful
form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and
no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision,
no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the
role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.18

These writers, therefore, unite in declaring that modern evolutionary
thought has shown or given us reason to believe that human beings
are, in an important way, merely accidental; there wasn't any
plan, any foresight, any mind, any mind's eye involved in their
coming into being. But of course no Christian theist could take
that seriously for a moment. Human beings have been created, and
created in the image of God. No doubt God could have created us
via evolutionary processes; if he did it that way, however, then
he must have guided, orchestrated, directed the processes by which
he brought about his designs.

Now again (as with Simon) we might say that strictly speaking,
when these people make such declarations, they are neither speaking
as scientists nor doing science. They are instead commenting on
science, drawing conclusions from scientific results--conclusions
that don't follow from the scientific results themselves, requiring
extra and extra-scientific (perhaps philosophical) premises. Perhaps
this is true, although it has become increasingly difficult to
draw a sharp line between science and such other activities as
philosophical reflection on science. Whether or not what we have
here is science strictly so-called, however, isn't really the
important question for my present purposes. Whether or not what
we have here is science or only parascience, we have deep involvement
with the spiritual struggle Augustine points out. In either case
that involvement must be noted and dealt with by the Christian
intellectual community, and in particular by the part of the Christian
intellectual community involved in the science in question.

Cosmic Fine-Tuning

My third example concerns 'fine-tuning' in cosmology. Starting
in the late sixties and early seventies, astrophysicists and others
noted that several of the basic physical constants must fall within
very narrow limits if there is to be the development of intelligent
life--at any rate in a way anything like the way in which we think
it actually happened. Thus Car and Rees:

The basic features of galaxies, stars, planets and the everyday
world are essentially determined by a few microphysical constants
and by the effects of gravitation. ...several aspects of our
Universe--some of which seem to be prerequisites for the evolution
of any form of life--depend rather delicately on apparent 'coincidences'
among the physical constants.19

For example, if the force of gravity were even slightly stronger,
all stars would be blue giants; if even slightly weaker, all would
be red dwarfs; in neither case could life have developed.20 The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear
forces; if either had been even slightly different, life, at any
rate life of the sort we have, could probably not have developed.

Even more interesting in this connection is the so-called flatness
problem: the existence of life also seems to depend very delicately
upon the rate at which the universe is expanding. Thus Stephen
Hawking:

...reduction of the rate of expansion by one part in 10exp.12
at the time when the temperature of the Universe was 10exp.10
K would have resulted in the Universe's starting to recollapse
when its radius was only 1/3000 of the present value and the
temperature was still 10,000 K. 21

--much too warm for comfort. Hawking concludes that life is
possible only because the universe is expanding at just the rate
required to avoid recollapse. At an earlier time, the fine-tuning
had to be even more remarkable:

...we know that there has to have been a very close balance
between the competing effect of explosive expansion and gravitational
contraction which, at the very earliest epoch about which we
can even pretend to speak (called the Planck time, 10exp.43 sec.
after the big bang), would have corresponded to the incredible
degree of accuracy represented by a deviation in their ratio
from unity by only one part in 10 to the sixtieth.22

These are striking facts; one sympathizes with Paul Davies:
"the fact that these relations are necessary for our existence
is one of the most fascinating discoveries of modern science."23

Now, one reaction to these apparent enormous coincidences is
to see them as substantiating the theistic claim that the universe
has been created by a personal God and as offering the material
for a properly restrained theistic argument.24 Another is to claim that none of this ought
to be seen as requiring explanation: after all, no matter how
things had been, it would have been exceedingly improbable that
they be that way. Appropriately taken, that is perhaps right;
but how is it relevant? We are playing poker; each time I deal
I get four aces and one wild card; you get suspicious; I allay
your suspicions by pointing out that my getting these cards each
time I deal is no less probable than any other equally specific
distribution over the relevant number of deals.25

Would that explanation play in Dodge City or Tombstone?

Still another reaction is to invoke the Anthropic Principle,
which is exceedingly hard to understand and comes in several varieties26 but (in the version
that makes most sense) seems to point out that a necessary condition
of anyone observing these values of the constants is that those
constants have very nearly the values they do have; we are here
to observe these constants only because they have the values they
do have. Again, this seems right, but what does it explain?
It still seems puzzling that these values should have been just
as they are. Why weren't they something quite different? One cannot
explain this by pointing out that we are indeed here--anymore
than I can explain the fact that God decided to create me (instead
of passing me over in favor of someone else) by pointing out that
if God had not thus decided, I wouldn't have been here to raise
the question.

But the reaction that most interests me here is still different,
and very striking:

Spatially homogeneous models can be divided into three classes:
those which have less than the escape velocity (i.e., those whose
rate of expansion is insufficient to prevent them from recollapsing),
those which have just the escape velocity, and those which have
more than the escape velocity. Models of the first class exist
only for a finite time, and therefore do not approach arbitrarily
near to isotropy. We have shown that models of the third class
do in general tend to isotropy at arbitrarily large times. Those
models of the second class which are sufficiently near to the
Robertson-Walker models do in general tend to isotropy, but this
class is of measure zero in the space of all homogeneous models.
It therefore seems that one cannot explain the isotropy of the
universe without postulating special initial conditions...

The most attractive answer would seem to seem to come from
the Dicke-Carter idea that there is a very large number of universes,
with all possible combinations of initial data and values of the
fundamental constants. In those universes with less than the escape
velocity, small density perturbations will not have time to develop
into galaxies and stars before the univers recollapses... It is
only in those universes which have very nearly the escape velocity
that one could expect galaxies to develop, and we have found that
such universes will in general approach isotropy. Since it would
seem that the existence of galaxies is a necessary condition for
the development of intelligent life, the answer to the question
'why is the universe isotropic?' is 'because we are here'.27

The idea here is clear: those values for the cosmological constants
and the rate of expansion in our universe are indeed puzzling
and in need of explanation. The explanation is just that there
are infinitely many different universes, displaying all possible
combinations of initial conditions and values for the fundamental
constants; and of course it is not surprising that we should occupy
one of the universes in which these values permit the development
of intelligent life.28
Shades of David Lewis and his aleph2 concrete possible worlds!29 I suppose there would
have to be at least uncountably many such universes, on the Hawking
hypothesis, since presumably there is a real interval about 1
such that for any real number r in that interval, the ratio between
the effect of explosive expansion and gravitational contraction
could have been r.

To make my point, I could stop here; but in the interests of
being au courant, I mention a couple of further developments
to this ongoing and fascinating story.30 Beginning in 1980, Alan Guth suggested a
solution to this alleged problem that is interestingly related
to the Hawking-Collins many-universe suggestion.31 According to Guth, we needn't suppose there
is more than one universe; that one universe, however is enormously
larger than the observable universe of some 10 billion
light years in diameter. The observable universe shrinks to a
tiny, nearly minuscule corner of the whole universe. Guth's model,
however, was subject to certain problems; a successor has been
proposed by A. D. Linde.32
In this model, the universe consists of a vast number of mini-universes;
these mini-universes are enormously larger than our observable
universe, and different mini-universes display different initial
conditions. Indeed, "the laws of low-energy physics and even
the dimensionality of space-time may be different in each of these
mini-universes: dimensions, values for those constants, and for
the rate of expansion, and so on."33

The point I'd like to make can be put as follows. Consider
the 1973 Hawking-Collins suggestion, or the more recent Linde
suggestion. Suppose, furthermore, that the principal motivation
for putting forth such suggestions is that they avoid the cosmic
coincidences. On these theories there is nothing noteworthy about
those constants displaying (in our universe) the values they do;
all values get realized in one universe or another, and of course
we human observers would be found only where the values are such
as to permit life. In other words, suppose the motivation for
putting forward these theories is what McMullin calls the "Principle
of Indifference."

This Principle of Indifference isn't easy to state exactly;
an essential part of it, however, is the idea that physical theory
should avoid anything like those cosmic coincidences, these apparent
fine-tunings, with their implicit suggestions of design.

Now a theist, so it seems to me, needn't be at all impressed
by this principle. If God created the world, why shouldn't it
display singularities or 'coincidences' of that sort? Why think
we don't have a proper physical theory until we get rid of such
things? If there were two theories that were empirically equivalent
(or nearly so), one of them involving violations of the Principle
of Indifference and the other involving the postulation of uncountably
many other universes or an enormous number of mini-universes,
the theist might well prefer the first on grounds of economy.
Of course there may be or may soon be independent evidence for
these other hypotheses, evidence that is independent of the Principle
of Indifference. Even if there is, however, there may well be
a difference between the epistemic probability of a Hawking-like
many-universe theory on theism and the evidence on the one hand,
and the epistemic probability of such a theory on naturalism and
that evidence on the other.

So here we have three examples; each is an example to show
that scientific theories are often not, in the specified ways,
religiously or metaphysically neutral. We have also noted, so
far, three ways in which a scientific theory can be relevantly
related to the theological or religious claims characteristic
of the theistic religions. First, a scientific theory may be incompatible
with those claims; secondly, it might be such that its probability
with respect to those claims is quite different from what it is
with respect to a naturalistic world view; thirdly, religious
or theological views can help determine what needs explanation.
Of course there will be many more examples of scientific theories
that are related in these ways to the theological or religious
claims in question (and such examples will be much more obvious
and abundant in the human sciences than in physics or chemistry).
Here I must emphasize two things. I am concerned with science
and scientific hypotheses taken as attempts to provide us with
truth; true explanations, true descriptions, true accounts of
various phenomena. I am concerned with Simon's explanation of
altruism taken as the proposal of a hypothesis as true (or nearly
true); and the same for evolutionary theory and the various proposals
of many-universe or inflationary universe theories. Of course
these theories need not be taken in that way. If instead we think
of science and its aims in the way in which, say, Bas van Fraassen
thinks of them,34 then
the whole picture looks very different. Then we might think, for
example, that the whole grand evolutionary story is improbable,
unlikely to be true, but nevertheless properly saves the phenomena
and properly performs the other duties to be expected of a theory
of its type. And even from a realistic point of view the Grand
Evolutionary Myth doesn't have to be probable to be accepted as
a guide to further research, a source of hypotheses, a means of
coming to a better understanding of the subject matter with which
it deals. Newtonian mechanics, we think, is, strictly speaking,
false; it is nonetheless useful in excelsis.

Alternatively, we could perhaps think of parts of science--sociobiology,
for example--not as attempts to provide a true or correct explanation
of human behavior, but as efforts to see how far we can go in
explaining human beings and behavior while appealing to nothing
beyond what the naturalist is prepared to appeal to.35 In this case our efforts would be hypothetical
rather than categorical. Suppose naturalism were true: what sort
of explanation could we come up with for, say, altruistic human
behavior? (Just as a naturalist might try to answer this question:
suppose Christian theism were true--what would be the correct
explanations of, say, aggressive or bellicose human behavior?)
I don't know of any reason to think theism would be relevant to
this project, except that a Christian might think there are better
ways to spend one's time--for example, in trying to find true
scientific accounts of human behavior and activity.

Weak Arguments for Methodological Naturalism

Now in view of these examples and many others like them (together
with broader Augustinian considerations), the natural thing to
think is that (in principle, at any rate) the Christian scholarly
community should do science, or parts of science, in its own way
and from its own perspective. What the Christian community really
needs is a science that takes into account what we know as Christians.
Indeed, this seems the rational thing in any event; surely the
rational thing is to use all that you know in trying to understand
a given phenomenon. But then in coming to a scientific understanding
of hostility, or aggression, for example, shouldn't Christian
psychologists make use of the notion of sin? In trying to achieve
scientific understanding of love in its many and protean manifestations,
for example, or play, or music, or humor, or our sense of adventure,
shouldn't we also use what we know about human beings being created
in the image of God, who is himself the very source of love, beauty
and the like? And the same for morality? Consider that enormous,
impressive, and disastrous Bolshevik experiment of the twentieth
century, perhaps the outstanding feature of the twentieth century
political landscape: in coming to a scientific understanding of
it, shouldn't Christians use all that they know about human beings,
including what they know by faith?

True: there could be practical obstacles standing in the way
of doing this; but in principle, and abstracting from these practical
difficulties (which in any event may be more bark than bite),
the right way for the Christian community to attain scientific
understanding of, say, the way human beings are and behave, would
be to start from what we know about human beings, including what
we know by way of faith. Hence the sorts of hypotheses we investigate
might very well involve such facts (as the Christian thinks) as
that we human beings have been created by God in his image, and
have fallen into sin. These 'religious' ideas might take a place
in our science by way of explicitly entering various hypotheses.
They might also play other roles: for example, they might be part
of the background information with respect to which we evaluate
the various scientific hypotheses and myths that come our way.

I say this is the natural thing to think; oddly enough, however,
the denial of this claim is widely taken for granted. As a matter
of fact, it has achieved the status of philosophical orthodoxy.
Among those who object to this claim are Christian thinkers with
impressive credentials. Thus Ernan McMullin:

But, of course, methodological naturalism does not restrict
our study of nature; it just lays down which sort of study qualifies
as scientific. If someone wants to pursue another approach to
nature--and there are many others--the methodological naturalist
has no reason to object. Scientists have to proceed in this way;
the methodology of natural science gives no purchase on the claim
that a particular event or type of event is to be explained by
invoking God's creative action directly.

Part of the problem, of course, is to see more clearly what
this methodological naturalism is. Precisely what does it come
to? Does it involve an embargo only on such claims as that a particular
event is to be explained by invoking God's creative action directly,
without the employment of 'secondary causes'? Does it also proscribe
invoking God's indirect creative action in explaining something
scientifically? Does it pertain only to scientific explanations,
but not to other scientific assertions and claims? Does it also
preclude using claims about God's creative action, or other religious
claims as part of the background information with respect to which
one tries to assess the probability of a proposed scientific explanation
or account? We shall have to look into these matters later. At
the moment however, I want to look into a different question:
what reason is there for accepting the claim that science does
indeed involve such a methodological naturalism, however exactly
we construe the latter? I shall examine some proposed reasons
for this claim and find them wanting. In Part III, I shall then
argue that, nevertheless, a couple of very sensible reasons lie
behind at least part of this claim. These reasons, however, do
not support the suggestion that science is religiously neutral.

Well then, what underlies the idea that science in some way
necessarily involves this principle of methodological naturalism?
First, and perhaps most important: this conception of science
is an integral and venerable part of the whole conception of faith
and reason we have inherited from the Enlightenment. I don't have
the space to treat this topic with anything like the fullness
it deserves; but the central idea, here, is that science is objective,
public, sharable, publicly verifiable, and equally available to
anyone, whatever their religious or metaphysical proclivities.
We may be Buddhist, Hindu, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jew,
Bahai, none of the above--the findings of science hold equally
for all of us. This is because proper science, as seen by the
Enlightenment, is restricted to the deliverances of reason and
sense (perception) which are the same for all people. Religion,
on the other hand, is private, subjective, and obviously subject
to considerable individual differences. But then if science is
indeed public and sharable by all, then of course one can't properly
pursue it by starting from some bit of religious belief or dogma.

One root of this way of thinking about science is a consequence
of the modern foundationalism stemming from Descartes and perhaps
even more importantly, Locke. Modern classical foundationalism
has come in for a lot of criticism lately, and I do not propose
to add my voice to the howling mob.36
And since the classical foundationalism upon which methodological
naturalism is based has run aground, I shall instead consider
some more local, less grand and cosmic reasons for accepting methodological
naturalism.

Notes

1.The idea is not, of course,
that a scientist won't be passionate about science generally,
or his favorite theories, or his reputation; it is rather that
none of these properly enters into the evaluation of a scientific
theory or explanation. return to text.

2."Science must be provisionally
atheistic or cease to be itself." "Darwin's Place in
the History of Thought" in M. Banton, ed., Darwinism
and the Study of Society (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961).
Willey does not mean, of course, that one who proceeds in this
way is properly accused of atheism. In the same way, to call
this procedure or proscription 'methodological naturalism' is
not to imply that one who proceeds in this way is really a naturalist.
(See Ernan McMullin's "Plantinga's Defense of Special Creation,"
Christian Scholar's Review [Sept. 1991], p. 57). return to text.

3.For an initial attempt to explore
some of these considerations, see my "When Faith and Reason
Clash: Evolution and the Bible" and "Evolution, Neutrality,
and Antecedent Probability: A Reply to Pun, Van Till and McMullin,"
both in Christian Scholar's Review, September, 1991, and
my "The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship": The
Henry Stob Lectures (Grand Rapids, MI: Calvin College, l989)
(pamphlet). return to text.

4.Science
250 (December, l990) pp. 1665ff. Simon won a Nobel Prize in economics,
but is currently professor of computer studies and psychology
at Carnegie-Mellon. return to text.

5.More simply, says Simon, "Fitness
simply means expected number of progeny" (p. 1665). That
this is the rational way to conduct one's life is somehow seen
as a consequence of evolutionary theory. But even if evolutionary
theory is in fact true, does this alleged consequence really
follow? Perhaps my having lots of progeny is in some way best
for my genes; but why should I be especially interested in that?
Couldn't I sensibly be concerned with my welfare, not theirs?
return to text.

7.Here I leave to one side the
teachings of early Genesis, since I am not sure just how those
teachings bear on the issue at hand. See my "Evolution,
Neutrality, and Antecedent Probability," p. 94. return
to text.

8. In 1952 Stanley Miller, a graduate student in the
laboratory of Harold Urey, showed that certain amino acids could
arise under what may have been the conditions of Earth before
life; this generated a fervent but temporary burst of dithyrambic
optimism. The optimism dissipated when the enormous distance
between amino acids and the simplest forms of life sank in, and
when there was little or no progress in showing how that distance
could have been traversed. See in particular Robert Shapiro,
Origins (New York: Summit Books, l986) and Thaxton, Charles,
Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen, The Mystery of Life's Origin
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1984). return
to text.

9. "It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the
origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter."
"Letter from Darwin to Hooker", The Life and Letters
of Charles Darwin, vol. 2, ed. Francis Darwin (New York:
Appleton, 1967), p. 202. return to text.

10. See The Mystery of Life's Origin, by Charles
Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1984); Origins, by Robert Shapiro (New York: Summit
Books, 1986); Evolution, Thermodynamics, and Information:
Extending the Darwinian Program, by Jeffrey S. Wicken (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Seven Clues to the Origin
of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and
Genetic Takeover and the Mineral Origins of Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985) by A. G. Cairns-Smith; and
Origins of Life by Freeman Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985); see also the relevant chapters of Michael
Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnet
Books, 1985). return to text.

11.Evolution, says Francisco J. Ayala, is as certain
as "the roundness of the earth, the motions of the planets,
and the molecular constitution of matter." "The Theory
of Evolution: Recent Successes and Challenges", in Evolution
and Creation, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, l985), p. 60. According to Stephen Jay Gould,
evolution is an established fact, not a mere theory; and no sensible
person who was acquainted with the evidence could demur. "Evolution
as Fact and Theory," in Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, l980), pp. 254-55. According
to Richard Dawkins, the theory of evolution is as certainly true
as that the Earth goes around the sun. This astronomical comparison
apparently suggests itself to many; in "Evolutionary Biology
and the Study of Human Nature" (presented at a consultation
on Cosmology and Theology Sponsored by the Presbyterian (USA)
Church in December, l987), Philip Spieth claims that "A
century and a quarter after the publication of The Origin
of Species, biologists can say with confidence that universal
genealogical relatedness is a conclusion of science that is as
firmly established as the revolution of the Earth about the sun."
And Michael Ruse adds his nuanced and modulated view that "evolution
is a fact, fact, FACT!" (Darwinism Defended [London:
Addison-Wesley, 1982], p. 58). return to
text.

13.According to Jesus, God remembers
each and every sparrow (Luke 12:6); might he not have been minded
to create the first of them specially? return
to text.

14.And of course part of the evidence,
for a Christian, will be the Biblical evidence. I myself think
that the Biblical evidence for a special creation of human beings
is fairly strong. return to text.

15.Of course it is possible both
that God did something special in creating human beings and that
they are genealogically related to the rest of the living world.
return to text.

19. "The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of
the Physical World," Nature, l979), p. 605. return to text.

20.Brandon Carter, "Large
Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology,"
in M. S. Longair, ed., Confrontation of Cosmological Theories
with Observational Data, l979, p. 72. Carter concludes that
if the strength of gravity were even slightly different, habitable
planets would not exist. return to text.

21."The Anisotropy of the
Universe at Large Times," in Longair, p. 285. return to text.

23.Davies, P. C. W. , The Accidental
Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l982). Davies
adds that "All this prompts the question of why, from the
infinite range of possible values that nature could have selected
for the fundamental constants, and from the infinite variety
of initial conditions that could have characterized the primeval
universe, the actual values and conditions conspire to produce
the particular range of very special features that we observe.
For clearly the universe is a very special place: exceedingly
uniform on a large scale, yet not so precisely uniform that galaxies
could not form; ...an expansion rate tuned to the energy content
to unbelievable accuracy; values for the strengths of its forces
that permit nuclei to exist, yet do not burn up all the cosmic
hydrogen, and many more apparent accidents of fortune."
(p. 111) return to text.

25. It is easy to see why this distribution is likely
to end in gunfire: the probability of that distribution is much
greater on the hypothesis that I am cheating than on the hypothesis
that the card's have been dealt fairly. By Bayes's theorem, it
therefore follows that the probability of my cheating given this
distribution is much greater than on other distributions. The
same thing goes for the fine tuning arguments; the probability
of fine tuning on the proposition that God has created the universe
is much greater than on the proposition that the universe has
not been created; consequently the probability of God's having
created the universe is greater on fine-tuning than on other
distributions of values over those constants.return
to text.

26.Martin Gardner distinguishes
the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP), the Strong Anthropic Principle
(SAP), the Future Anthropic Principle (FAP), the Participatory
Anthropic Principle (PAP), and the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic
Principle; see his "WAP, SAP, FAP and PAP," New
York Review of Books, May 8, 1987.return
to text.

28.There is a hint of some of
the confusion surrounding the anthropic principle in the last
sentence: "Because we are here" isn't an answer to
the question "Why is the universe isotropic?" although
"Only because the universe is isotropic" may be an
answer to the question "Why are we here?" There are
other problems with this suggestion as an explanation: see John
Earman, "The Sap Also Rises: A Critical Examination of the
Anthropic Principle," American Philosophical Quarterly,
October 1987, pp. 314-315. return to text.

29.See his On the Plurality
of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., l986). return
to text.

30.A story that is well-told in
Ernan McMullin's "Fine-tuning the Universe?" not yet
published. In this and the next paragraph I am following McMullin's
version of this story. return to text.

34.See, e.g., his Quantum Mechanics
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 1-4. This way certainly
has its attractions when it comes to claims about the wondrous
world of quark and gluon and the history of the universe for
the first 10-32 seconds. return to text.